Audited all of our vendor VPN accounts to check for inconsistencies and matching with up-to-date Business Associates Agreement, Terms of Use, and Non-Disclosure Agreement that we have the vendors sign.

Recently ran into this on a PC that failed to do the Sophos client 9.0->9.5 update smoothly. As a side note only one out of all of our workstations is not bad. :->

The Win XP SP3 PC seemed like it basically got stuck in process of the 9.5 update and would not do any updates, either DAT file or program. I am including all errors and my attempts to solve below as in my searching I could not find a quick solution and hoping this will help others. It is a tad log, but wanted to make sure I included all of the gory details...Some of these I found trolling thru the SophosTalk forums.

What I did to try to address - note all these failed for me but may work for you. After every one I did reboot PC and then attempt to install Sophos client from my Server Console to this PC. For a majority of these attempts the above error is still basically what I received.

- First tried to use the 'Add and Remove Programs' Control Panel logged onto PC with main local PC admin account. No-go on removing any of the three Sophos components: 'Sophos Antivirus', 'Sophos AutoUpdate' and 'Sophos Remote Management System'

- Removed all Sophos files/folders including Program Files and and Sophos files/folders in all the User Profiles. Disabled all Sophos Services. Also removed quite a few Sophos registry entries including the main one at HKCU\Software\Sophos (Note: their are literately a ton of them throughout the registry and thinking that may have been my issue. )

- Turned off 'Allow Indexing Service' on the local C: (This one sounded the most promising - but still same install error)

- Removed all ALxxx.xxx files from the C:\Windows\prefetch folder

- Installed and ran Revo Uninstaller Pro - surprisingly the same result I received when I just tried Add/Remove Programs (?)

Just about to give up and create a Sophos support ticket when I did one last thing as I am thinking rootkit on this box at this point-

(Drum roll please.......)

Loaded up a copy of the MicroSoft Fix It portable tool (here) I had on hand and then used that to to do:
-> Install or Upgrade software or hardware->Fix problems with programs that can't be installed or uninstalled->Detect problems and let me select the fixes to apply->Uninstalling->went thru one by one and selected the three Sophos components -'Sophos Antivirus', 'Sophos AutoUpdate' and 'Sophos Remote Management System' - and then rebooted.

For me after that one step I was able to then install Sophos 9.5 client to that PC from my server console...Life is good now-at least for that one PC and Sophos. I went ahead and ran a full scan and on that PC after first install and reboot all was clean. Yea!